Julian Assange once said (in this London speech: youtube.com/watch?v=TQV…) that wars are always ultimately started by the media, via the manufacturing of consent to prepare public opinions.

He asked: "Let us ask ourselves of the complicit media, which is the majority of the mainstream press: what is the average death count attributed to each journalist? [...] Who are the war criminals? It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists. Journalists are war criminals."

Assange didn't precise this but it is not just journalists: to manufacture consent for most recent wars they were in an unholy alliance with an ecosystem of so-called "human rights" activists who constructed the arguments, the reports, the talking points for their articles. People like @AlinejadMasih and @NazaninBoniadi (👇) in the case of Iran, who tirelessly for years built the arguments for the war, providing the "moral" scaffolding for it. They too very much are war criminals.

I've made that argument for years. If you genuinely care about human rights (and if you genuinely care about journalism), you should be in direct opposition to most (not all) human rights organizations and activists in the world today because they have so thoroughly corrupted the concept - turning it into little more than the humanitarian packaging in which wars and sanctions are wrapped and sold to the public.

It's supposed to be a shield meant to protect the vulnerable and they've made it into a weapon used to justify their persecution and destruction.

As the war goes on and their own country and people get destroyed and massacred, Iran's "human rights" activists will try to distance themselves from it - as they're already starting to do 👇- but, make no mistake, this is the very logical consequence of their own actions and they couldn't not have known.

Every single time it's exactly where this road leads: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, all justified - to some extent - on the basis of "human rights", of "saving women from oppression", of "liberating" people or "giving them a voice." And every single time the result was the same: tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the country destroyed.

They saw this, they knew this, and they did it to their own people anyway. You simply can't plead ignorance.

In many ways it's even worse in the case of Iran because their "human rights" activists even actively called for war.

Just this January, Alinejad wrote an op-ed in the NYT (nytimes.com/2026/01/27/…) in which she explicitly called for U.S. military intervention against her country, dismissed comparisons to Iraq and Libya as "paralysis" and a "permanent permission slip for every dictator," and went full Orwell by framing the absence of war as having "a body count." She literally preempted the very argument I'm making - that previous interventions destroyed countries - and explicitly dismissed it. So she definitely can't plead ignorance!

Same story with Boniadi. She herself in her screenshotted tweet 👇 acknowledges that she advocated for "targeted intervention to bring down the regime." And at the Munich Security Conference just 3 weeks ago, she was on stage alongside Reza Pahlavi (securityconference.org/…), actively lobbying for foreign military intervention and regime change.

Assange was right that journalists are war criminals - but at least journalists can hide behind the pretense of "reporting." These people literally campaigned for the war, making it their life's cause. The bombs falling on Tehran, the current acid rain and the schoolgirls massacred are not a betrayal to them - it's exactly what they were calling for!

I know I'm being utterly naive but at some point there should really be a reckoning for the entire ecosystem that makes these wars possible, and for what has been done to the very concept of human rights.